Research: Hispanic Television Market: Univision and Telemundo continue to grow

The 2011 Pew Research Center report entitled The State of the News Media found that Hispanic media is doing better than traditional mainstream media outlets.

Today we are analyzing the Hispanic Television Market:

The Spanish language television network audience sizes have grown. Univision, the largest Spanish-language network by far, continued to grow, reaching audience sizes that compete with the three major English-language broadcast networks (ABC, CBS and NBC). In 2011, it also announced the launch of a 24-hour Spanish-language news station.

The number of Hispanic households with TV sets increased 3.1% in February 2011 from the year before. That is more than three times the increase in TV households overall, which grew 0.9% according to Nielsen Co.

Bilingualism has had some impact on audiences, almost a quarter of Hispanics who speak English mostly at home, 24%, watch between one and three hours of Spanish-language TV a day.

Television ad spending grew in 2010. Spanish-language TV ad spending rose 10.7% from 2009 according to Kantar Media.That is double the bounce that network TV overall received, 5.3%, and also outpaces revenue growth for television media overall (10.3%).

According to experts in the industry, the 2010-2011season is projected to bring in $1.5 billion in ad revenue.Univision and its cable channel TeleFutura accounted for about $1.1 billion and Telemundo about $400 million (Source: Consoli, John. “A Very Good Year for Hispanic TV)

Univision and Telemundo

Univision is now the fifth-largest network in primetime audience in the United States. For the season (June 2010-May 2011), Univision averaged 1.9 million viewers ages 18 to 49 in primetime, according to Nielsen. This figures represents an 8% up from last year.

In 2011, Univision also extended its mobile news offerings, releasing an iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad app in April and continuing to reach its audience via Twitter feeds in bothEnglishandSpanish.

Despite its gains in audience, for the last five years Univision has carried significant debt from a 2006 decision to take the company private, in a debt-ridden deal. Haim Saban, Providence Equity, TPG and their partners bought the network in a $13.7 billion deal, with debt that exceeded 12 times the company’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

The television unit alone increased 16.7% to $1.86 billion, up from $1.59 billion in 2009. Of that, $109.5 million came from the FIFA World Cup. But despite the revenue, the company in 2010 reported a loss of $555.9 million.

On the other hand, while muchsmaller than Univision,Telemundostill reaches 93% of all Hispanic television households and can be found in 210 markets across the U.S.

The network had record-breaking ratings the first quarter of 2011, averaging more than 1.2 million total viewers for the quarter, which was an 11% increase from the year before.